The Worship of Venus

Stamp print

One of Peter’s largest and most beautiful stamped prints, this image both updates an ancient theme in his usual playfully ironic manner and gives it an added seriousness. He was familiar with renaissance versions of the subject, but his has a monumentality that reaches back past such sources to the most exalted evocations of the power of love in ancient poetry. The one foremost in his mind was probably the opening of the great philosophical poem On the Nature of Things (De Rerum Natura) by Lucretius, which begins with an invocation to Venus, acknowledged as source of all life and the most powerful force in nature.